Engineer’s vision to turn tide for the big river

Sep 15 2008 by Andrew Hebden, The Journal

It’s been quite a year for Tony Trapp. Last March, he finally completed the sale of his Engineering Business, in Northumberland, for £30m-plus and this month, he was named the new David Goldman Visiting Professor of Business Innovation at Newcastle University Business School. He tells his story to Andrew Hebden

A SIMPLE quotation attached to the noticeboard in Tony Trapp’s office in Broomhaugh House, the grand former home of the famous Swan family, neatly characterises his own remarkable story.

“Persistence is omnipotent,” former US President Calvin Coolidge once said, and Dr Trapp’s success is certainly testimony to that. And you could add determination, bravery, ingenuity and entrepreneurship for good measure.

Barely a decade ago, Dr Trapp was drawing up plans for his new company in the bedroom of his home, a few miles down the road from the Engineering Business (EB) HQ at Broomhaugh House, in the pretty Northumberland village of Riding Mill.

It’s tempting to say that, back in 1997, he couldn’t possibly have envisaged the success story EB was to become. And yet he did – remarkably accurately, in fact.

He was joined at that early stage by three former colleagues from SMD, the Wallsend underwater engineering equipment business, which by that stage had become Dr Trapp’s life.

Then, reeling from being unceremoniously dumped by SMD, he conceived a 10-year plan for the new company, to be financed by the quartet’s pension funds and with the target of achieving a £10m turnover within the decade. Ultimately, he wanted each of the four original shareholders to receive at least £1m after tax as reward for their efforts.

The four founding directors weren’t the only ones celebrating when this year’s £30m sale of the company to Dutch company IHC Merwede – which beat-off two other potential suitors – was concluded.

After share options were made available to all staff, 70 each received an average payout of £90,000 – and some significantly more. No wonder there’s a buoyant mood in the bustling corridors of Broomhaugh House, the former hotel bought by the directors using their pension funds.

The deal capped a remarkable decade for Dr Trapp and the business, although it has never been an easy journey.

The firm’s first four years saw it focus on designing and building equipment for the submarine telecom market, but this collapsed catastrophically as the dotcom bubble burst at the millennium.

It then spent three years developing technology for the renewables sector, becoming a leading developer of tidal stream technology as well as doing work in wave and offshore wind energy sectors. That avenue proved short-lived after an exhaustive study of the technical and commercial viability of the technology convinced the firm that it was not a sensible use of resources.

So, five years ago, EB decided to focus instead on offshore oil and gas, designing and building equipment for pipe laying, subsea trenching and specialist marine handling systems. And it has reaped the rewards of being an innovative business in a booming sector.

The arrival of new Dutch owners by no means marks the end of the story for the company’s directors, Dr Trapp is keen to point out. They remain in charge of its operations, but now have the support of a 1bn turnover business, something that is a necessity given the scale of the contracts the EB is now regularly securing.

Aside from the fact that the grand old building seems an unlikely setting for an industrial business which designs and makes giant pieces of engineering kit, something else strikes you when you visit the company. There are so many young faces about.

Indeed, in an industry where talk of a skills shortage seems never-ending, the fact that a third of the company’s workforce are in their 20s is quite remarkable.

Not that Dr Trapp feels that the company has got there yet. His decision to take up the David Goldman Visiting Professorship of Business Innovation at Newcastle University Business School, a post named in honour of the late founder of Sage, is a sign of his passion for getting more young people interested in engineering.

“The biggest challenge is the lack of trained engineers,” he said. “We have got to enthuse people to get them back into engineering; we’ve got to tell them that there is good money and a satisfying career on offer.

“This region inherently has a passion for engineering, but we’ve got to get people – get the children – interested ... There is a huge market out there, so there are a lot of opportunities.”

His latest appointment continues Dr Trapp’s long association with academia, something which surely seemed unlikely when he left school at 15. Although he had demonstrated early signs of his business acumen by selling sodium pellets to his school friends, he admits to having been something of a “naughty boy”.

Although his father had been an engineer, it was his first job working at a local nursery near Wimbledon in London that honed his interest in following in his footsteps. He went on to study agricultural engineering at college and then moved north to Newcastle University to study for a BSc in mechanical engineering.

His first impressions of the North East – struggling to comprehend the accent and images of raw sewage flowing under the Tyne Bridge – didn’t bode well, and yet it was to become home for most of his life. Despite this, he speaks highly of his time at Newcastle, which he enjoyed before moving to Edinburgh University to take up a lecturing post.

It was while in Scotland that he decided a life in academia was probably not for him. “The students were great, but you looked around the staff room and you could see your whole life mapped out in front of you,” he said. Dr Trapp returned to Newcastle and work as a research associate developing offshore and seabed geotechnical technology, just as the North Sea oil boom was beginning.

Immediately opportunities began to emerge with major players such as BP, which was looking for technology to help it lay a pipeline for its Magnes Field. At the same time, BT was seeking help to lay the first transatlantic fibre optic telephone cable.

It was an exciting arena to be working in.

“It was very different from agricultural engineering, which had been honed down to perfection over hundreds of years,” he said. “When it came to (subsea) earth moving, almost no one knew anything about it at all. It was a complicated new field and that meant new opportunities.” The return to Newcastle brought him into contact with SMD, which had recently moved into pipeline and cable burials, and he became a full-time director in 1984. The research he did at that time became the basis of the development of SMD – and the wider industry – for many years.

Dr Trapp recalls his time at SMD with great fondness as it played a pioneering role in the development of cable plough technology, including winning a Queen’s Award for Technology.

He eventually rose to the position of sales and marketing director and would travel the globe securing lucrative contracts for the business.

The association with SMD was to reach a bitter end, however. Although he owned a 10% share in the business, a majority was owned by the Reece family and a clash of personalities erupted when Allan Reece’s youngest son succeeded him as managing director.

Looking back, he regrets not seeing the dangers lurking on the horizon.

“I was the face of SMD,” he recalls. “In the end it was described as a personality clash. My big mistake was not paying attention to the politics of the business; I was just working at the coal face. One of the biggest lessons I should have learned is that you should always be able to see the bigger picture.”

Dr Trapp, who was in his early 50s, eventually negotiated a pay-off, but it had been a messy affair. It was unclear where his career would take him next.

“It was clear that I wanted to be in charge of my own destiny,” he recalled. “The normal thing would have been to go to Aberdeen and to get a job with someone up there. They thought I would retire and they felt that they had given me enough money to go into retirement. Really that company had been my life, so to be suddenly chucked out was a big shock.”

Ten years on and the remarkable success of EB has gone some way to healing those wounds. Not that building the business into a £30m operation with more than 150 staff marks the summit of his ambitions.

His vision now is for his company to be at the forefront of regeneration of the Tyne, where he laments the use of such extensive parts of the formerly industrial riverside for residential and leisure development.

He would like to see more development centred on his company’s 6,000sq m workshop complex at Hadrian Riverside, Wallsend. “We cannot allow the riverside to be used for more quayside bars,” he said.

“Take a boat trip down the river and it is a depressing scene. It was depressing 10 years ago and it still is.

“Part of what we want to do is to help regenerate the Tyne and the Tees. It is disgusting what’s gone on; it’s not that we don’t have the skills, it is because we don’t have the entrepreneurial businesses. On the whole, it is not as successful as it should be. Where we are working is pretty derelict.

“In Holland, where our parent company is based, they have proper commercial management behind them, which is something we haven’t had in this region. There is not enough of it going on here – there should be a lot more.” Taking up his new role at Newcastle University Business School, where he succeeds Fiona Cruickshank of the Specials Laboratory, is just a small part of that.

He has yet to decide how to use his year as visiting professor, but insists: “It’s not just a PR exercise. I want to be doing something that is going to make a difference.”

You can bet he will. In the meantime, Dr Trapp is demonstrating persistence of a different kind – he is currently taking part in a month-long charity trek across the Namibian desert.

Eleven years after being “primed” for retirement by his former bosses, there’s no sign of this 63-year-old entrepreneur opting for the quiet life just yet.

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CV

Born: 1945, Leamington Spa

Educated: Rycotewood College, Oxfordshire; Newcastle University

1973-78: Lecturer, Thermodynamics, Edinburgh University

1978-1996: Systems director, later marketing director, SMD

1997-Present: Managing director, The Engineering Business (now IHC Engineering Business)

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Questionnaire

What car do you drive? Land Rover Discovery – I live in a house that is 1km from the nearest road with a ford to cross

What’s your favourite restaurant? Vong in New York

Who or what makes you laugh? Jane at EB has the knack

What’s your favourite book? I’m currently reading An Appeal to Reason by Nigel Lawson

What’s your favourite film? Pretty Woman

What was the last album you bought? Mitsuko Uchida plays Schubert is in the CD player in the car at the moment

What is your ideal job, other than your current role? Classical musician

If you had a talking parrot, what’s the first thing you’d teach it to say? OSBIT (On Spec, Budget In Time)

What’s your greatest fear? No point dwelling on fears.

What’s the best piece of business advice you have ever received? Persistence is omnipotent – Calvin Coolidge

Worst business advice? Didn’t take it...

What’s your poison? Laphroaig single malt

Which newspaper do you read, other than The Journal? The Times

How much was your first pay packet and what was it for? 1s 3d per hour for my first job, aged 15, working at a local horticultural nursery

How do you keep fit? Work out at the gym three times a week. Walking 30km a week – in training for my charity trek across Namibian desert

What’s your most irritating habit? Being too self-sufficient

What’s your biggest extravagance? Flying club class to see my daughter in New Zealand

Which historical or fictional character do you most identify with/ admire? Isambard Kingdom Brunel – we need his spirit in the North East

And which four famous people would you most like to dine with? Bach, Paul McCartney, Boris Johnson and Margaret Thatcher

How would you like to be remembered? As someone who made a difference